General-Purpose Update Post - SCA Combat, Gaming, AND A&S, all from recent activity.

Apologies for long delays between posts; recent events have kept me distracted and busy.  Perhaps most significant of those is that I signed a contract as a contributor to Ulisses Spiele's Torg Eternity line.  I'm not going to get into details on that, but it turns out that an eclectic skillset, and knowing someone interested, turns you into an RPG author.  That has been occupying much of the runtime that this blog had been.

The other significant-to-me development is that there's an aikido group on the north side of Austin that includes, among its other activities, Yagyū shinkage-ryū lessons (and, since the Yagyū family's involvement in the school, never mind the school's existence, predates 1600, that makes this an A&S post!).  The irony of this is that the park where most of those lessons take place is the same park where Austin's SCA group, the Barony of Bryn Gwlad, does most of their combat practices, and it is theoretically possible, if BG ever holds Sunday rapier practice again, to walk from Sunday shinkage to rapier practice and vice versa.  Of course, current COVID restrictions on SCA practices may prevent me from doing so because I live in a different SCA group, and Sundays are usually a day reserved for not other people's activities, but it is an option.

Between these two things, my mental runtime has been fairly heavily devoted to other things recently.  However, because I picked up shinkage specifically to improve my SCA fighting by looking at swords from a different context, and because Yagyū Munenori's Heihō Kadensho (written 1632, but the drawings date to about 1605) is one of the few illustrated Japanese fechtbuchs we have, I have a few entry-level thoughts on this.  First, a lot of the lessons reinforce the lessons of SCA combat - that weight commitments are harder to undo than do, power comes from core activation, that you drive off the "back" foot for every movement, and that fights start at ground level, not at the sword.  Second, even if the sword moves in an arc, the shortest, most direct energy commitment is the most efficient.  Third, even if it is exclusively reliant on forms and not sparring, shinkage has useful lessons  of its own in timing, measure, and, weirdly enough, how to use a moulinet as a defensive technique rather than just a rebound (call it nagashi all you want, it's a defensive moulinet).  The advantage of forms and kata over sparring, for that particular purpose, is the ability to drill a very specific skill.

That particular thought, in fact, is what brought me back to post this.  I was considering training approaches, and the difference between drill and sparring, and the benefits of each.  SCA training, such as it is, has historically relied very heavily on sparring.  Sparring is a good thing, because sparring is the standardized test of combat training.  Sparring is how you determine where a student is in their overall fighting ability and sparring tests things that drill just doesn't - how flexible a student is in their ability to respond to a situation, for instance, or their ability to solve tactical problems without an assist.  Where that approach utterly fails, however, is in teaching.  If you are simultaneously worried about keeping your guard up, and moving your feet, and making that block, and putting your hip into it, and, and, and, and, and... and your opponent has even a small measure more experience in those things than you do, then you wind up feeling frustrated and incompetent, when the truth is simply that you haven't been taught to do those things when not under the gun, same as a student who tries to invent the wheel on an exam is not going to do as well as one who already knows the material from experience.

The difference between practiced fighters and people who show up to fighter practice and spar is what they were doing when not sparring.  The ability to identify skills, movements, and techniques that need practice, and to develop ways of training those skills, is a key component of training, and it is one that is frequently neglected by entry-level fighters in all martial arts, not merely SCA combat; the SCA just reinforces that by having sparring-focused fighter practice occasionally and leaving everything else to homework.  Unfortunately, this is like only coming to school to take exams or quizzes, and never having a directed program of study.  This is the "rifle and potato" approach to combat training, where you're issued a rifle and a potato, and told to go find and kill the enemy; in an actual combat scenario it means that those who survive pick up patchworks of skills without a holistic training approach.  That's a fine approach with deep reserves of manpower and a callous disregard for human life, but it's not a great approach for developing long-term, sustainable proficiency in combat.  Given that the program of any martial art should be focused on keeping its students alive long enough to master the skill, this is a problematic approach produced mostly by the fact that the SCA especially is not combat-minded.

By "combat-minded," I mean that mentally most SCA fighters - and I do not mean most knights or Crown contenders, I mean "most people who pick up a stick and fight" - do not consider engagement to be lethal.  One of the things that shinkage emphasizes, for instance, is that you use shinai and bokken as simulators, the real thing is a three-foot length of sharp steel, and if I do this to you with sharp steel, or you make that commitment and I don't respond the way you expect, then you are badly injured or dead.  In contrast, SCA fighters tend to assume that the worst consequence of a fight, because they are assuming that the be-all and end-all of their combat is rattan, is deep-tissue bruising.  That is partly game-ism produced by the SCA ruleset (a sword to the helm isn't actually "good"); it is also partly a training deficiency because most SCA fighters simply do not consider the possibility that they will be using an actual sword, or even that they will be engaged in actual combat.

I don't have an answer to this, other than to draw attention to it, especially in training.  Part of my own way of dealing with it is to have my SCA weapons be much more sword (or axe)-like than the norm, to reinforce mentally that it is a sword, and should be treated with the respect due to a sword.  Of course, that doesn't stop me from being hit, and it doesn't make me treat the incoming attack that, realistically, a sword is due, which is an area I think shinkage, due to its non-armored training, does better - even a fukuro shinai, delivered forcefully, is a good reminder that you don't want to get hit, and even at the entry level, there's an emphasis that we're not training with sticks, we're training with swords and using sticks for safety reasons.

Meanwhile, training continues.